IBM Day: Recap of RTP Kubernetes meetup on blockchain, Kubernetes and upstream development

The Research Triangle Park (RTP), NC, Kubernetes Meetup is a well-organized event and its members regularly meet every month. It has over 750 registered members. The meetup speakers are SMEs from various companies like Red Hat, IBM, Lenovo, Google, and many local startups like CloudPerceptions. The last Kubernetes meetup for 2017 took place on November 30 at The Frontier – RTP. It was hosted by IBM and organizers of the meetup Shixiong Shang (@shshang), Randy Tuttle (@randyttl) and others. A special thanks to Doug Davis (@duginabox) for helping with organizing the event.

Blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, and deployment over Kubernetes

Tong Li had a great session on this topic. Tong is a long-time contributor to open source and he currently contributes to the Hyperledger Fabric project. The first two charts took about 15 minutes with interactive and questions from audience. There were lots of questions and curiosity about how blockchain works.

Tong started with an introduction to blockchain, used Bitcoin and Etherum as examples of how blockchain technology works; he added a lot of details regarding the hash code calculation, consensus algorithms and showed audience both Bitcoin and Etherum live chain status. After introduction to blockchain technology, Tong spoke about the Linux Foundation open source project, Hyperledger Fabric. He talked about the key differences between Bitcoin, Etherum and Hyperledger Fabric. Due to the fact that deployment of Hyperledger Fabric network is not a trivial task, Tong introduced the audience to the Hyperledger deployment project called Cello. At the end, Tong gave a demo to stand up Fabric network.

Kubernetes issues management and upstream development

Sahdev P. Zala presented this topic. Sahdev is a Kubernetes upstream contributor and also a core reviewer in the OpenStack. Sahdev has actively contributed to open source development for over five years. The past meetups were featured amazing speakers but mainly focused on the Kubernetes operations. So, based on interest from meetup members, this session was targeted at current or potential new contributors to help them learn the upstream contribution opportunities, with focus on issues management and pull request work flow.

Following is the presentation outline:

Along with the presentation, Sahdev encouraged people to contribute to the project. The talk focused on using live material from the Kubernetes GitHub repositories. For example, a walk-though was provided on how labels and bots work, what docs are required to set up the development environment, and the issues triage guidelines.

The charts have all the online links for easy references. The session was very interactive, featuring discussion from multiple members. Some of the questions/discussion/feedback topic highlights from members include:

“Knowing how it works, seems like the Kubernetes project is well managed and easy to contribute. I wish some of my colleagues were here too.”

“I have opened an issue long time back but no one looked at it which was disappointing but I have found a fix and I will be creating a Pull Request once get some time.”

“Do I run into any legal trouble using or contributing to the project?”

“Startup companies run into issues with Kubernetes and they create fixes locally but do not have resources to contribute to upstream.”

Overall, good attendance, interactions, and organization made it possible to have another great Kubernetes meetup in the RTP. We look forward to more in 2018.

Sahdev P. Zala is a senior software engineer in the IBM Digital Business Group Open Technology division. In his current role, Sahdev is focused on contributing to the Kubernetes, etcd and OpenStack upstream development. He is a member of Kubernetes and CoresOS github organization. He is also a founding Project Technical Lead (PTL) of OpenStack Heat Translator and TOSCA Parser projects. Previously, he worked on developing IBM software for small and medium businesses and cross-product serviceability. He is an author of IBM red books, developerWorks articles, blog posts, white papers and several other technical docs. Sahdev has been a speaker at various OpenStack summits, open source conferences and meet-ups. He was a Keynote speaker at the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) Conference and INDIGO-DataCloud Summit 2017 in Catania, Italy.